Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Along with war and inflation, Trump's corruption is bringing down the GOP.
“Under the Constitution, Congress controls our public money,” David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, told TMD. Federal officials who spend money for a purpose Congress didn’t authorize face administrative penalties under the Antideficiency Act—up to suspension without pay or removal from office—and knowing violations are a crime: Super said anyone involved in arranging, paying for, or running the ads could be prosecuted. Congress’ own lever is the purse; it could cut off the agency’s money until it obeys the law, Brand said.
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Whatever the legal fallout, the purpose of the ads—beyond flattering the president—is hard to see, and the commercials don’t seem to be persuading viewers. Steve Passwaiter, president at Silver Oak Political and a longtime analyst of political advertising, shared with TMD an analysis by PharosGraph, a data firm he advises, that scored the spots with the same model it runs on campaign ads. Among rural conservatives and evangelicals, they landed about as well as the average Republican ad. But for independents, swing-state voters, and suburban women, “a standard Republican ad from another candidate or PAC is actually performing better,” Passwaiter said. “It’s just preaching to the choir.”
Despite his low approval ratings, Trump has asked Republican voters to “pretend” he’s on the ballot, and perhaps the ads are aimed at doing that (despite some Republicans disagreeing with that strategy). But they are not being placed in battleground states. According to PharosGraph’s read of AdImpact data, the spots have aired in 207 of the country’s 208 TV markets, with more than half the money going to football broadcasts and the Sunday political shows—a buy built to reach nearly everyone, carrying a message written for people who already agree with the president.
The sums are small, too. “$20 million might make a difference in Maine,” Jack Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, told TMD, but at a national level, it’s hardly anything. Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has spent about $63.4 million on advertising in his Texas race alone. While CBP has contracted the full $20 million to an ad agency, only a fraction has gone to airtime so far: AdImpact estimated that the ads had cost at least $2.5 million to air through September 29. Nationally, Pitney said, the White House is likely “hoping for reverb”—news coverage, particularly from right-wing media, that carries the ads further than the airtime does.
Pitney said the ads suffer from a lack of specificity, noting that successful attack ads “need a visible enemy on the other side of the field.” Trump doesn’t have a singular adversary at this stage of his political career, so he is forced to call out anachronistic and abstract enemies, like “the villains, the communists.”
“It’s part of a broader phenomenon that he doesn’t have anything new to say,” Pitney said.
As in 2024, Trump says it is the "final battle." If 2024 was the final battle, why is he repeating the line. And doesn't he expect the US to have another election in two years?